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John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

I still have a hard time calling myself a writer or even press (although it’s convenient for getting into conferences). Plus, I think I reach, influence and interact with as many or more people than the traditional healthcare journalist. However, there’s something liberating about being called a blogger instead of a journalist because the standard and approach is different.

At least I thought that was the case until I read this article on Forbes.com which declares Allscripts new API as “Open Source’s Debut in Healthcare.” Ok, to be fair, it was written written on a Forbes healthcare blog and not their magazine, but as a blogger I’m embarrassed that a Forbes blogger would write such a terrible article.

Let me set the record straight. Allscripts launched an interesting API (which they call an “Application Sote & Exchange”). It’s a sort of app store for healthcare IT. This is interesting news and worthy of a story. What it’s not is open source entering healthcare.

Maybe there is some sliver of open source software that’s part of the Allscripts API/App store (or maybe not), but that’s backed by a heavy set of proprietary Allscripts software. It’s not like Allscripts has open sourced their MyWay or Allscripts Professional EHR. Then, you could really talk about Allscripts entering the open source EMR world. This is NOT!

Besides the fact of saying that is open source when it’s not, is the blogger’s headline that this is the first open source in health care. That’s just absolutely silly. Here’s just a few of the Open Source EMR on the EMR and HIPAA wiki page that have been around for quite a while and led I believe by OpenEMR and the various flavors of Open Source Vista EMR.

Honestly, Zina Moukheiber should be embarrassed by what she wrote. Even a blogger should be held to a higher standard than what she wrote. Of course, the sad part is that her mistakes likely drove a ton of traffic to the post. It’s her top post with 51 people tweeting the post and 15 people sharing it on Facebook. Too bad she lost all credibility in the process so the short term spike won’t turn into long term readers.

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